How much does the average US Patent cost? How long does a Patent last? Who holds the current record for the most US Patents?
Fees: http://www.uspto.gov/go/fees/index.html
Length: http://www.uspto.gov/web/menu/helpfaq.htm#a17
Most: Per year, IBM traditionally dominates, pulling in about 2800 patents in 2000.
Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents… I don’t know if that is the record or not.
For normal people, Kodak seems proud of their engineers and scientists with 100 patents…
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/researchDevelopment/achievements/prolificInventors.shtml
Or more general information:
Edison still had the record for an invidual as of 1999, according to this statement before a Senate Committee.
All of Edison’s patents. He also had 1,239 non-U.S. patents.
John Hays Hammond, Jr is supposedly second most prolific, with 437 patents.
I generally charge in the $10k/patent area for corporate clients with a large stream of business and who patents things in the same field (very little learning curve from one patent to the next). I might charge as much as double for a one-shot inventor or company. That is normally only work up to the initial filing. Expect the application to sit with the PTO for a year or three. Once they get around to it, it will cost a couple of thousand for each back-and-forth between us and the PTO.
Does that include the fees to the government? Or is it just your time?